Devin Nunes Will Save Us All From The STRAW POLICE

Great Freedom Fighter Devin Nunes, the cow-romancing congressman from California, briefly amused Twitter Sunday with yet another example of just how far down the road to socialist dictatorship America has traveled: A waitress, he claimed, asked him if he wanted a straw with his drink. Does anyone still remember when we used to be a free country?

Here's Nunes fretting about just how insane his home state has gotten:

You see, California really does have a new law aimed at cutting down on plastic waste that ends up in the ocean. And it really does require full-service sit-down restaurants to ask customers whether they want a straw. And there really are straw cops! No, actually, there aren't. Except there might be, kinda sorta: plain old restaurant inspectors, according to the text of the law. Just look at the tyranny!

This section shall be enforced by an enforcement officer. The first and second violations of subdivision (a) shall result in a notice of violation, and any subsequent violation shall constitute an infraction punishable by a fine of twenty-five dollars ($25) for each day the full-service restaurant is in violation, but not to exceed three hundred dollars ($300) annually.

But nahh, there aren't any strawtroopers out there looking just for felonious straw violations. If there have been any incidents of waitstaff being dragged off in chains to reeducation centers for distributing straws without asking, we sure haven't heard of it. That's not even in the law -- but maybe it's cleverly hidden.

Nunes was roundly mocked all over Twitter, with people noting that socialism and protecting the environment really are different things, and that being given a choice, as a consumer, actually sounds a heck of a lot like capitalism. Cornell history prof Lawrence Glickman felt compelled to invoke free market avatar Friedrich Hayek:

Otherspointed out that while being asked if you want a straw isn't particularly socialist, getting farm subsidies sure sounds like some kind of big government socialism, huh?

The Daily Caller really went to town on the story, producing an insta-piece on current straw regulations in several cities and soberly noting, "Conservatives argue such laws reek of government overreach, while Democrats consider plastic straw bans a move in the right direction." Funny thing, though, the piece doesn't say what that "right direction" might be, because Democrats simply like having oppressive control over your life and forcing you to decide if you want a straw or not, while in a free country you would get a straw and then discard it without using it as God intended.

Because we are not Tucker Carlson's Internet Tendency, here is why reducing plastic waste kind of matters and is not socialism, courtesy of Michael Torti, of the environmental group Surfrider San Diego:

We do beach clean ups every single month along our county, and [in 2017] we collected 174,000 pieces of waste. Out of that, 4.5 percent were straws and lids, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it comes out to about 7,800 items [...] So once in the ocean, they photodegrade into tinier pieces, they're mistaken as food by marine life and they work their way up the food chain into our food.

Haha, that is silly, and attempting to do anything about it is DUMB. Nunes thought his SOCIALIST STRAW POLICE idea was so very funny that he returned to the joke Sunday evening!

You know, a wild-eyed socialist might point out that if a straw blew into his garden from some restaurant's trash, that kind of illustrates why it might be a good idea to cut down on the amount of plastic waste out there.